Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Time passes. That's for sure.
I always aimed at being a legend.
Older men get lovable, and older women get monstrous.
I thought 'Chelsea Girls' was going to change my life.
I tend to view my life as an accident, almost as a dream.
Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy.
I am always hungry and wanting to have sex. This is a fact.
Who doesn't want to be famous? I am famous. I'm dying to be on TV.
Art feels like it has this frame, and it's either outside or inside.
The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time.
I wake up with a sense of wonder. I don't dread the future. I like it.
When we have relationships with animals, we often make up who they are.
Poetry is my politics. It's an opportunity that gives me a way to speak.
I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live.
It's a big statement if you use the word 'America' in the title of your poem.
I'm a poet born in the era of Andy Warhol and a generation that wanted to be famous.
I'm the weird poet who has paid her dues in the experimental world for 30 or 40 years.
The poet is like the earth's shadow. The sun moves, and the poet writes something down.
Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.
I've had a lifelong waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling when something good happens.
I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will.
Urban nature is like living with mass conditions. It sometimes feels like a myth & you are its scribe.
Lyndon Johnson, I know for a fact, was a great president. And I don't mean by that he was a great man.
A vote should be generative, not like business as usual, which is what voting feels like for most of us.
Women aren't physically afraid of men; women are genetically afraid of men. It's happened for such a long time.
Everybody loved me running for president in '91 and '92 because they never knew a presidential candidate before.
Part of the glamour of being a poet was always this long reach into the future. You knew you were managing time.
I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.
I wasn't afraid of being poor. I didn't want to live in a big house. I'm the perfect size for poetry. I can move around.
Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling.
The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs: you're their friend.
People loved to talk about how Frank O'Hara didn't really care about getting published. That doesn't jibe with my experience.
With Instagram, you're captioning a moment. Twitter is the caption without the image. Even if it's there, the words come first.
I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live. Reading by reading, I just kind of follow my nose.
If I had been a good student and an achiever, I might have been excited by a more systematic approach to writing than what I do.
I didn't know how to write a novel, so I sort of let it happen in waves. The only way I could write it was to think like scenes in a movie.
I'd like to sit down with Hillary Clinton onstage and ask her about Glass Steagall and all the big banks and her own campaign contributions.
Listen, I have been educated. I have learned about Western Civilization. Do you know What the message of Western Civilization is? I am alone.
The poet is like the wise fool or like a version of the stand-up, because we're standing, we're doing stand-up. That's exactly what we're doing.
Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us.
I love Canada, and I dated someone who was Canadian a few years ago, and she brought me into a deeper understanding of the greatness of the culture.
People love discovering you. The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs, you're their friend.
When I'm writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don't mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness, and that's the birth of the poem.
Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn't about, and I don't mean writing style, but cultural style.
In Arlington, people would laugh at you if you tried to get people to look at your drawings or listen to your poetry. It was like you thought you were special.
I always think of childhood as the inarticulate moment, and you have your little camera. You were filming it, recording it, you just didn't know how to speak it.
The first time I voted, I voted for Eugene McCarthy and I knew he wouldn't win, but it felt so great to vote for him, to vote for the right guy - the one who wanted peace.
Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away.
If the poetry world celebrate its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence, poetry would wind up being a largely female world, and the men would leave.
I was like the family clown. The middle child entertaining. I was a lousy student, but interestingly, the nuns always let me write plays or do drawings, endless special projects.